Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobinL | Hacker News Reader

That stat is bonkers. China's GDP is only 5x that of UK. Total UK solar is about 19GW.

So even if you divide China's solar by 5, they added in a month what we have built in >10 years

Comparing to the UK probably isn't the best though since the UK latitude makes it not super favourable to Solar. It would be better to compare it to Southern Europe.

Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.

I don't think it's going to look much better if you add in wind capacity :(

Looking it up... 16 GW onshore and 15 GW offshore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd... This graph looks like it started in earnest in like 2005, so 1.6GW/year on- and offshore combined, peaking in 2017 with 3.5GW in one year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...

8X by nominal GDP, 9X by PPP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

you know what's really fun is that the value in US dollars of all that solar energy market in china was only about 2.5 times higher than the value of the solar market in the US in 2024 (despite total capacity and newly installed capacity in china both being about 7x)

We should have an actual GDP measure where bloat like finance and real estate are removed. Would really like to see a comparison using that measure.

we have one, it's called MPS and it was used by the soviets and most of the communist countries including china until the 1990s. china has still not fully transitioned away from MPS and into SNA which is one reason their service sector share of GDP seems so impossibly low

Sounds like that could give useful insights. I couldn’t find MPS - do you have a link please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Product_System

GDP PPP certainly doesn't get all the way, but it probably is more appropriate for this sort of comparison.

It is more likely that UK policy is bad, and they are not installing much solar.

I mean, it's a difference of policy; spend on solar rollout isn't a significant part of either country's GDP.

GDP PPP is probably the more appropriate comparison here, by the way (a big part of the cost of solar isn't buying the actual panels), and China's GDP PPP is 10x the UK's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com